Nearly everything on this page goes on the opener you have now. You do not need a new machine to open the garage with a code, to hand a spare remote to your daughter, or to see who is at the garage from your phone. Below is what we supply and fit, when each one is genuinely worth the money, and what we do on the day. If your opener is old enough that it cannot take a particular accessory, we will tell you that before anyone drives out, not after.
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Keypads
A keypad is a small weatherproof pad that mounts outside, beside the garage door, and opens it with a code instead of a remote. It is the accessory we are asked for most often and the one that changes the most about how a household uses its garage. Everyone gets their own code, so nobody has to share a remote or hide a key under a rock by the step. Anyone arriving on foot, on a bike or back from a run gets in without carrying anything. And on the evening a remote goes missing, the garage still works.
A keypad runs on its own battery and needs no wiring, so fitting one is a matter of pairing it to your opener and putting two screws into the trim. It goes on the opener you already have, provided the safety sensors at the bottom of the tracks are working. We supply, program and mount the LiftMaster L979M, and we program universal keypads on most other brands.
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Extra Remotes
Most households end up one remote short. A second car arrives, a teenager starts driving, a visor clip gives up, or the original remote goes through the wash. An extra remote is the cheapest accessory on this page and the quickest to sort out: it is paired to your opener in under a minute, and the opener happily holds several at once alongside any keypad you already have.
The two things worth knowing are that remotes are brand specific, so a Genie remote will not talk to a LiftMaster opener, and that a remote which has simply stopped reaching the door from the end of the driveway is usually a flat battery rather than a dead remote. If a remote has been lost rather than broken, the safe move is to clear the opener's memory and re-pair only the devices you still have, which is a five minute job on the visit. We carry remotes for the brands we supply and can program most others.
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Battery Backup
Battery backup keeps the opener working through a power cut. In a London winter that matters more than it sounds: an ice storm takes the power out, the car is inside the garage, and without a backup the only way out is to pull the emergency release and heave a very heavy door up by hand, in the dark, on your own. A backup battery runs the opener for a day or so of normal use and puts its own light on so you can see what you are doing.
This one is the honest exception on the page. On most openers, battery backup is built into the motor unit rather than added to it. Some recent models will take an add-on: LiftMaster and Genie both make a backup module that retrofits to selected openers, and Chamberlain sells a backup kit for certain belt drives. Openers older than the backup-ready era cannot be retrofitted at all, and then it is a new opener rather than a new part. We confirm which of the three your opener is before anything is ordered.
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Wi-Fi and the myQ App
Wi-Fi connects the opener to your home network so your phone can open and close the door, tell you whether it is open right now, and send you a note if it has been sitting open for an hour. The two things people actually use it for are checking from the office that the door went down, and closing it from the cottage when they realise it did not.
Some openers made from about 2012 onward are already Wi-Fi ready and simply need setting up on your network, which is a short job and often something we do at the end of another visit. Some others can take a separate hub that mounts on the ceiling beside the opener. And for an older opener there are third-party controllers that sit between your wall button and the motor and work with almost any make, with the newest LiftMaster and Chamberlain security systems the main exception. We set up myQ on the openers we install as a matter of course.
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Security Cameras
A garage camera watches the one door in the house that is most often left open by accident. Some newer openers have a camera built into the motor unit, which streams to the same app that opens the door. Saved clip history, the part that lets you scroll back through what happened, is usually a paid add-on rather than something included. Others are served better by a standalone camera aimed at the garage, wired into the same system as the rest of the house.
What a camera is genuinely good for is settling the everyday questions: did the parcel actually arrive, did the kids shut the door when they came in from hockey, who was in the driveway at two in the morning. What it is not is a substitute for a working door and a sensible code on the keypad. We will tell you honestly whether your opener can take a built-in camera or whether a separate one makes more sense, and we can fit and set up the opener-mounted type on the units we supply.
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LED Lighting
The light on the opener is the only light most garages have, and on an older unit it is a single dim bulb on a timer that runs out while you are still unloading the car. Newer openers use built-in LED panels that light the whole garage properly and never need a bulb changed. On an older opener, the cheap version of the same upgrade is a proper LED bulb rated for use in a garage door opener.
That rating matters more than people expect. An ordinary LED bulb in an opener head often puts out enough radio interference to cut your remote's range down to a few feet, which is the single most common cause of a remote that suddenly stops working from the driveway. If your remote got worse right after somebody changed a bulb, that is almost certainly why. We carry bulbs that do not do this, and we will check the range before we leave.
